Synology DS216j - Transcoding

[Aspesi4]

I'm trying to understand the limitations of an underpowered Synology NAS like the DS216j. It does not have built in hardware for transcoding, but If I'm feeding multiple TVs in my home at original quality, is there any transcoding required? Can a basic NAS support multiple clients if the quality on the Clients is at Original?

What about with remote Clients.... Can a basic NAS feed a remote client or two if the quality is set to Original as well? From what I can tell from transcoding, issues come up when the NAS needs to convert or downscale the original stream do say 720p, 6mbps, etc.

I currently have an Nvidia Shield that I'm using as the Server. I'd like to go back to my Synology since I use Youtube TV, but want to be able to support remote clients. The other option is to upgrade my NAS to something like the DS220+. I'd rather not do that if possible though.

[racameron]

@Aspesi4

If I'm feeding multiple TVs in my home at original quality, is there any transcoding required? Can a basic NAS support multiple clients if the quality on the Clients is at Original?

Yes, this will work fine.

@Aspesi4

Can a basic NAS feed a remote client or two if the quality is set to Original as well?

Yes. It will serve the remote clients fine, too. You may run into issues if your upload bandwidth is not at least 10Mbps.

@Aspesi4

I'd like to go back to my Synology since I use Youtube TV, but want to be able to support remote clients.

If I'm not mistaken, that model of NAS does not support TVE sources. If off-loading the server from your Shield is the goal, upgrading your NAS to at least a 218 would be the best bet. (Also, that way you can support remote clients with hardware transcoding.)

[Aspesi4]

Thanks for the response.

I did try this Synology NAS originally before switching to my Shield and it worked fine with TVE sources. The issue was the remote clients were constantly buffering and I think that had a lot to do with the playback quality set to something less than original quality. I upgrade my internet, so upload shouldn't be an issue. I'll try it again and make sure there's no transcoding.

What about Com Skip? I assume when the NAS is feeding multiple Clients and doing Com Skip at the same time it may struggle. Is there a way to set the Com Skip to only process say between the hours for 2AM and 6AM?

[racameron]

@Aspesi4

I assume when the NAS is feeding multiple Clients and doing Com Skip at the same time it may struggle. Is there a way to set the Com Skip to only process say between the hours for 2AM and 6AM?

Yes, Comskip can tax the processor. This will become even more evident if the processor is trying to transcode at the same time, too. And no, Comskip jobs cannot be queued to run at particular times; it is run after a recording completes. (If a Comskip job is currently running when a recording finishes, its commercial detection gets queued as only one Comskip job runs at a time.)

[Edwin_Perez]

@racameron

es, Comskip can tax the processor. This will become even more evident if the processor is trying to transcode at the same time, too. And no, Comskip jobs cannot be queued to run at particular times; it is run after a recording completes. (If a Comskip job is currently running when a recording finishes, its commercial detection gets queued as only one Comskip job runs at a time.)

Comskip only uses available CPU ... it Runs as low priority so that it really does not bog the CPU. All other tasks take Priority over Comskip. Seeing high CPU usage during Comskip is nothing to fear.

[chDVRuser]

@Edwin_Perez

Comskip only uses available CPU ... it Runs as low priority so that it really does not bog the CPU. All other tasks take Priority over Comskip.

On my two Synology NAS's comskip runs at normal priority and uses one CPU core per thread_count setting. So quad core, thread_count=2 takes 50% CPU.

[Edwin_Perez]

I guess that is one advantage of running on a Windows PC it runs on low priority always. It only takes a few minutes to run on my PC.